


onto the cool tile floor to weep

by aisle_one



Series: Love and Felching [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:37:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aisle_one/pseuds/aisle_one
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A near tragedy has Eames reconsidering his choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	onto the cool tile floor to weep

**Author's Note:**

> Follows shortly after Wednesday the 13th.
> 
> _____

Eames gnawed on his bottom lip, launched himself from the sofa, and paced - wash, rinse, repeat. Like an automaton for the last hour. Where the hell was Arthur? 

He strode to the door, opened it, peered out in the hallway, shut it. He strode back to the living room, picked up his cell phone, and punched a key. Locked, but lit up, and still no messages. No answers to his texts. No returned calls and none missed. He considered calling Ariadne, Cobb. Even Yusuf - they had gone for tea just this afternoon (coffee for Arthur), folding into Eames's routine without needing Eames there. Perhaps if Eames had been he wouldn't be here now, wearing away a hole in the rug. No one had seen Arthur since early evening - sevenish, Cobb said, when Arthur was still wiling away in his office and Cobb had checked in, then checked out. That was over three hours ago.

There could be reasons, reasonable ones for why Arthur wasn't home yet, why he hadn't returned any of Eames's calls. His cell phone battery could have died. He might be with a client - Saito, in New York City for a visit, mostly pleasure, but there was always a little time for business. If he wasn't caught up there, he might be caught up at work, office phone turned low, and _in the zone_ , where it would take the office burning to the ground to shake Arthur out of it. 

Arthur could just disappear. Wink out in his mind, sharp as flint, puzzling through rules, regulations, constructing and dismantling legal strategies swift as turning the pages of a book. His zeal made him coveted - and a lot of enemies. But swordsmanship in Arthur's world was dominated by intellectual sparring. No one worth a reputation would sink to thuggish antics.

If Arthur _had_ disappeared - and Eames had been toying with the thought, too frightened to commit to the possibility as anything more than paranoia, burgeoning about the time when Arthur hadn't called him back after his fifth text, three voicemails, and two hang-ups spanning a half hour - Arthur's enemies would not be responsible. 

Where was he? Disappeared, dead, or dying and suffering - Eames didn't know which was worst. Eames landed back on the sofa hard, his hands in his hair. His mind was whirling like a tornado swooping up everything in its path and spitting it back out wrecked and irreparable, and no - the worst prospect sat with a dead weight in the pit of Eames's stomach. This might be his punishment. _Eames_ might be responsible for this.

Seconds later, his phone rang. A godsend, he thought, his hands shaking with anticipation, and he was awash with momentary relief. But it was Cobb. Arthur's emergency contact. Not Eames, whose mobile number was strictly for business and Arthur, and too frequently disconnected from unpaid bills. They exchanged few words and Eames was flying out of their apartment, no more pacified by the call.

 

_

 

Eames kept bumping into people. "Excuse me," he said to a nurse zipping through the halls, to an elderly man with a cane, and "Christ fucking fuck!" when a toddler rushed out of an elevator and Eames nearly tumbled. "Sorry," he muttered to the parents who spilled out after the kid intent to make his break, careening through the hospital lobby, though he wasn't at all. Children were at their charming best when asleep. On an ordinary day, he had little patience for them and right now he just had to get to Arthur.

Cobb met him halfway, rising to his feet when he saw Eames approaching. He shoved his hands in his pockets. Fatigue was etched in the corner of his eyes. "The nurses are with him," Cobb said, tilting his head toward a room further down the hall. 

"How is he?"

"Beat up, scrapes and bruises everywhere. He's as bad as he looks. Fractured tibia, head injury - though minor, no significant trauma. That's the good news." Cobb sighed and swayed back on his feet. "There was some internal bleeding, but they cut into him when he got here and stopped it from seeping into his heart and lungs."

"When he got here?" Eames asked, Cobb's specific articulation niggling an alarm in Eames's head.

"By cab. Same one that ran him off the road. Arthur was still conscious and lucid enough to spit back his license plate number at him, and the guy freaked. Or must have, maybe he figured a personal delivery would mitigate his offense."

"Jesus, that was stupid."

"No shit. The doctors think it aggravated the internal bleeding when the idiot moved him. But he beat the clock. An ambulance couldn't have done that magic, winding through those narrow streets in Chinatown for the quickest route."

"Tell it to the jury." As far as Eames was concerned, there was no act of kindness or duty that could rebound this guy off Eames's shit list. "Is he still around?" He smoothed his hand over the other, the sharp jut of his knuckles on his right, and contemplated satisfaction from evening the score. After he saw Arthur, a brief respite for his nerves and the need to touch, if fleetingly - and sense memory had Eames's fingers curling for the imagined pulse point inside Arthur's wrist, the fragile throb high on his neck. The confrontation would be quick. He would be fair, no weapons other than his fists, and he would return less shaky and damaging to Arthur, less propelled by the weight of his fear and how it might dictate his hands. Might he be too rough? He had never worried before, handling Arthur like a ragdoll in play or in bed, or when Eames lost his temper, and Arthur gave it as good as he took it. But - Arthur could have died and Eames wanted to crush his fear at the possibility, and crush Arthur to him assured of his solidity, the give of his flesh spry and stout with life.

"Hey," Cobb said, startling Eames from his stupor. He leaned in, squinting. "You all right, man?"

Eames scrubbed a hand over his face. "Yeah," he muttered. "I'm peachy. _Obviously._ "

Cobb snorted. He clapped Eames on the back. "To answer your question, no. The cabbie left, fortunately for him. I think I just witnessed him die at least three violent deaths in your head."

"Four - unless you counted the stoning." Eames looked past Cobb's shoulder and pointed. "He's in that room, yeah?

Cobb nodded. "Listen, he's in bad shape, but the injuries are...well, it could have been worse. He might complain later about abdominal pains, aching in his back and neck, but none of it is permanent, no lasting damage. That's what the doctors said and I think - it's good to keep that in mind, while you're in there."

Minutes later, Cobb's assurances dissipated quick as dew seared by a hot, burning light. At the sight of Arthur, Eames's chest seized. "Oh, darling," he whispered. The poor love was a mess, his face mapped in a camouflage of black and blue, as if layered over by several panels of a Rorschach test. The left side of his jaw was scraped raw as hamburger meat, and the same asphalt burns striped down his arms and legs. His head was bound in white and his mouth - Eames traced the ragged lines of it with his eyes - his pretty, coy mouth was split, bottom lip fractured where a pout blossomed occasionally. Eames descended into the chair positioned by Arthur's bed. Carefully - and it was, his earlier haste now tempered by reality and Arthur's fingers limp and motionless, and his tiny pinky taped up and in a splint - Eames scooped up Arthur's hand in his and held it. "Hi there, you," he said.

All Eames could do was stare, and catalogue, and hover his free hand. Every so often, he pet Arthur in places, patches of flesh spared by the accident. No. Not accident. The incident. This game changer that unintentionally elevated their relationship to - what now? Just when the blissful sheen of reconciliation had mellowed to a more reliable consistency, just when Eames had discovered a third, middle path between vacillating from fear of having and fear of not. Just when they were learning to roll with the punches and the occasional row, and Eames was regularly turning down the boys to stay in with Arthur tucked to his side, propped in front of the telly for whatever shite show Arthur felt like wasting a brainless hour on.

What now? This taste of _almost_ had Eames reconsidering the odds, the risks. Arthur shivered faintly. His lips parted in a soft sigh and his eyelashes fluttered, but he didn't wake. Eames pulled the sparse, hospital issue blanket to Arthur's chin, and lingered his fingers there, along a scrape, in a faint caress of his pale, sunken cheek. He may not have landed Arthur here, but he could have.

 

_

 

Hours ago, he lied. 

"Check me," Eames had said, raising his arms for the offered pat down. When Arthur hesitated, he urged, "Come on." 

Arthur stepped forward, hands poised and ready, then shook his head. "I'm not doing this." And he had backed away, forming loose fists at his sides. " _We_ are not doing this."

"You said you trust me."

"I do."

"So?"

"So!" Arthur threw his hands in the air. "You decide, Eames. You chose this, remember?" He spun on his heels and stalked to the door.

"Where are you going?" Eames called after him.

"Out." The door banged shut.

After Arthur was gone, Eames pulled the sofa cushions apart. He pulled free a loose floorboard in the hall. He flipped their bed mattress and cut open a hole that had been threaded closed. When he was done, his stash was strewn haphazardly throughout the apartment, lumps and lumps of green. He could deploy delivery duties to Yusuf, but it would mean having to forgo profit. And the rush. The rush from a smooth trade, or a dangerous one, sent his blood spiking in euphoria and little compared. Sex with Arthur did - and when Arthur caught him stupid and gibbering, punch drunk in a post-orgasm haze with stars in his eyes, unfiltered and honest in his appraisal.

But temptation lay in his palm, weighing no more than twenty-one grams, and impulse control had never been his strong suit. Alternatively, he could do overtime, starting tonight, and by the week's end he'd be cleaned out, and could legitimately go legit, as he had promised Arthur, as he had sworn up and down, "I am, I am!" Not I will, not yet a thing of the present.

 

_

 

The irony was Arthur lying on a hospital bed when his worry had been that Eames would land himself there, eventually.

"It's not the dealing, Eames," Arthur had once said, exasperated. Then quickly corrected himself, "Not that I like it." Not that being with Eames compromised him every day, threw off kilter his regimented life, risked his hard-earned career - all things Arthur could have said and had, but not then. Not for some time. "But - " he shifted his eyes away " - what if something happened to you? That's what I think about. That's what keeps me up at night when you're not here and I know why. _'What if he doesn't come back?'_ Then what, huh?"

What now? With the shoe on the other foot and the gods of karmic retribution having nastily made their point, and an unearthed, devastating worry bled into the fabric of Eames's very being. Knowledge had the power of undoing, and Eames would never - could not ever - shake this again.

Eames dragged his chair forward. He leveled his face with Arthur's and pressed his cheek to the pillow, close, close as he could get. Arthur's warm, labored breath skated over his chin. His lovely, damaged, mortal darling. Eames's eyes stung as his own breath caught - close, too close. He pressed a light kiss to Arthur's lips and stitched a silent promise in his heart to begin. From here, Eames would begin.


End file.
